BuzzFeed hires New York Times editor to head up its business section

BuzzFeed News announced on Tuesday that it hired veteran New York Times business news editor Jennifer A. Kingson as it continues to build up its newsroom following President Donald Trump’s election last year.

“Jennifer will build on the great work our comrade Tom Gara and team achieved since we launched the desk, while working to elevate and transform what readers think of as business coverage, with an emphasis on the way changes in commerce and finance shape and influence our readers’ lives,” Editor in Chief Ben Smith said in a memo to staff.

“We plan to track and explain how changing consumer habits, emerging technology, the shift from physical to digital retail, the transformation of higher education, the downward spiral of brands, the emerging workplace, and of course big macro-economic forces affect our readers across the beats our reporters cover. Jennifer is the perfect person to lead this coverage.”

Kingston, who joined the Times for in 2004, will replace former editor Tom Gara, who moved over last month to launch BuzzFeed’s opinion section.

As many other digital newsrooms have refocused resources on video and pondered the future of editorial content, BuzzFeed has doubled-down on its editorial desks following the election.

According to a spokesperson, BuzzFeed News has hired 65 people since November, and has increasingly beefed up its hires from legacy media publications. Kingson, who previously edited big-name Times writers like Andrew Ross Sorkin and Gretchen Morgenson, joins Times expats like global editor Lisa Tozzi and global news editor and investigations editor Ariel Kaminer.

Earlier this year, the outlet hired Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Henry Gomez as a national politics reporter to cover Republicans in the age of President Donald Trump from the midwest, a push to better represent issues outside the Northeastern “Acela corridor.”

The site has also attempted to focus more closely on media issues following the election.

“One difference is obviously Trump’s unusually close and obsessive relationship with the media, particularly TV, which is why we brought Steven Perlberg in on a Trump and media beat on our politics team,” Smith said in an email with Business Insider in February.